HKUK13002U Cancelled RADIANT (IN)VISIBILITIES - A BEING OF SENSATION

Volume 2020/2021
Content

Nietzsche, the last metaphysician, as Heidegger regarded him, staged himself the dramatic demise of Western metaphysics bringing about its own disintegration. This great and terrible event that struck with horror the popular imagination, took place in full light at the Great Noon. In his Twilight of the IdolsGötzen-Dämmerung, a pun on the title of Richard Wagner's opera, Götterdämmerung, or 'Twilight of the Gods', Nietzsche describes How the "True World" Finally Became Fiction. Twisting free of the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible, thought to be until then the very grounds of metaphysics, it was possible to inaugurate in the Humanities a new interpretation of the sensible, and to give a new sense to the visible.

Setting up a forum of discussions around the consequences of this crucial moment in human sciences, the course proposes a series of LabsTeach in which the students become part of the debates. The discussions will move around the theoretical paradox emerged in the aftermath of this event that cancelled the subordination of the sensible to the intelligible. The paradox was that not only the intelligible disappeared in the fable, but that the sensible itself was abolished, albeit in its form of appearance: ''With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!" (Nietzsche) It is why it was necessary that a new visible had to be invented, a new discourse of the sense of the sensible discovered. But the sense of sense (as in the French sens, in which it signifies the direction of a motion) proved to be rather alluring and mysterious. Released to itself, the sensible reflected a fundamentally new vision, and a new being – a new sensing being – a being of sensation. In Merleau-Ponty’s vision: A new Incarnation of the world.

A round of six Labs, each consisting of two sessions, will be devoted to the carnal texture of the world envisaged by Merleau-Ponty in his The Visible and the Invisible, which remains one of the most cryptic texts of the new emerging discipline of phenomenology that came to replace the empty place left after metaphysics deserted the stage. Recent research will help us navigate through the “magma” of his intriguing term la chaire du monde (the flesh of the world). His vision is paradoxical (la chaire is not matter, neither spirit, nor substance), it is actually not a body, rather a radiant sensation, at once visible and invisible, an inverted stream or magma – a chiasmus. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, “a sort of incarnate principle” or “element,” “at the end of those rays of spatiality and of temporality emitted in the secrecy of my flesh.” Most probably, a not-topological chôra. Yet another re-inscription of the chôra in history (Isar).

But as Jean-Luc Nancy pertinently asks, what sense does to discourse if sense exceeds significations (Nancy, Le Sens du Monde, 37)? We will eventually find out more at the end of our rounds of debates structured around some key themes, which will engage some other theorists and their work arising from the problematic of the work of art, and the strategic importance of the question of art in a non-metaphysical thinking of being. Among them, Heidegger and his Earth concept and its “radiant” limits or “the bordering stream,” Bergson’s élan vital, and Deleuze’s moment when consciousness joins matter, and when matter and life align to form “art.”

But first, we must start da’ capo, and clarify what Nietzsche wanted to say in his abbreviated statement: “Noon: Time of the shortest shadow.” “Simmering.” (Nietzsche)

Haar, Michael. The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994; Mauro, Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible. Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004; Mauro Carbone, The Flesh of Images, Merleau-Ponty between Painting and Cinema, SUNY Press, 2015; Dastur, Françoise. "World, Flesh, Vision." In Chiasms, Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh, by F Evans and

L. Lawlor, edited by F., Lawlor, L. Evans, 23-49. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.—. Nature. Course Notes from the Collège de France. Compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard. Translated by Robert Vallier. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003; Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” In The Birth of Tragedy and OtherWritings, by Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs, 139-153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Sallis, John. Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.—. Transfigurements. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998; Zeifa, Ammar. “Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty; The Sense of the Earth and the Earth of the Sense.” Phenomenology and the human positioning in the cosmos; the life-world, nature, earth, 2013: 255-289; Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer (German: Götzen-Dämmerung, oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert), 1889; Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. (Minneola: Dover Publications, 1998); Henri Bergson, “Life and Consciousness,” Mind-Energy, London: MacMillan, 1921; Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind. An Introduction to Metaphysics, (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980; Elizabeth Grosz, DELEUZE, BERGSON AND THE CONCEPT OF LIFE Revue internationale de philosophie 2007/3 n° 241, p. 287-300.

LabsTeach er en form for samarbejde mellem læreren og de studerende, der består i undervisning, forlæsninger og laboratorier af diskussioner i grupper og i plenum, til afklaring af begreberne, og fænomeners mekanisme. Der vil være 6 store temaer gennem hele kurset, hver udviklet gennem 2 sessioner hver à 4 timer (i alt 8 timer). I den første session (4 timer), der er relateret til et af de 6 temaer, vil der være en afklaring af de teoretiske aspekter, og i den anden session vil der være anvendelige projekter, det vil sige en præsentation af små projekter af de studerende, med feedback fra læreren såvel som fra alle de andre studerende. Det forventes, at der vil være studerende, der forbereder deres portefølje, men alle de andre studerende vil være involveret i mere eller mindre aktiv deltagelse.
  • Category
  • Hours
  • Lectures
  • 56
  • Preparation
  • 279
  • Guidance
  • 1
  • Exam
  • 84
  • Total
  • 420
Written
Oral
Individual
Collective
Continuous feedback during the course of the semester
Feedback by final exam (In addition to the grade)
Peer feedback (Students give each other feedback)
Credit
15 ECTS
Type of assessment
Other
Censorship form
No external censorship
Criteria for exam assesment